“I’m just wary of trying to explain a thing in a really kind of explain-y way before it’s happened.” Dawn King is being appropriately secretive about her new play, spy thriller Ciphers, politely refusing to give too much away about it before it opens at Exeter’s Northcott Theatre, the first leg of a nationwide tour. She doesn’t want to make “a big thing” of it; she just doesn’t want to pin the play down. Now, she’d “happily wank on” about acclaimed dystopian parable Foxfinder, which made her name when it premiered in 2011. But only because it’s been out there for a while.
In Ciphers, a woman is plunged into a world where nothing is as it seems, including identity, as she seeks answers about the death of her sister, a secret agent. The story was inspired by the demise of MI6 agent Gareth Williams, whose body was found in a bag in a bath in a London safe house in 2010. Rumours of a cover-up swirled, as Williams’ family pursued an inquest into how he had died.
A member of the secret service found dead in mysterious circumstances, with a family member trying to discover the truth, was “a classic thriller beginning.” But the “element of grief” beneath everything was what really drew King in. “When I’m writing I’m always looking for the universal or archetypal; the things that it doesn’t matter where you are, you’ll be able to understand them.” Where Foxfinder had “scary woods” and “almost fairy tale things”, Ciphers “has a lot about family, secrets and journeying into a maze, trying to find the truth. Those things are universal.”
Ciphers is a co-production between new-writing company Out of Joint, Exeter Northcott and London’s Bush Theatre. As we sit in the empty Finsbury Park office of Out of Joint’s artistic director, Max Stafford-Clark, I try to elicit more information from King by asking how the play explores the idea of a ‘cipher’. “There’s a certain amount of decoding, of putting stuff together, that the audience needs to do,” she replies. “That’s the spy thriller part of it.” But “there’s also the fact that here’s a person, he’s an actor, but he’s also standing in for other things.”
So far so tantalising, but that’s as much as King will say about the relationship between Ciphers’ themes, its style and its structure, other than to disclose that it isn’t a straightforward spy thriller: “you can’t stage this play naturalistically.” In fact, as she was writing it, she wasn’t sure how it was going to work. “Fortunately, Blanche and the technical team have done an amazing job.”
Ronny Jhutti and Gráinne Keenan in rehearsal. Photo: John Bradfield
This is King’s second time working with Ciphers’ director, Blanche McIntyre, following their collaboration on Foxfinder, which picked up an Off West End Award for Most Promising New Playwright for King and contributed to McIntyre winning Most Promising Newcomer at the 2012 Critics’ Circle Awards. Recently, McIntyre directed a hugely acclaimed production of Chekhov’s The Seagull, for Headlong. She has been nominated for Best Director at this year’s TMA UK Theatre Awards.
King describes the experience of McIntyre directing her work again as “really wonderful,” because of the creative shorthand they’ve cultivated. “I trust her completely. She would give me her honest opinion, even if she didn’t like my script. And that has happened before,” she says, laughing. “Blanche has an amazing analytical brain. It’s like a big searchlight. She really understands human psychology.”
After more than a year spent working on various radio, TV and film projects, is King nervous about returning to the theatre world following Foxfinder’s phenomenal success? “What do you mean? I don’t feel like I’m under pressure at all!” she jokes.
In fact, the seeds for Ciphers were sown before Foxfinder went into rehearsals. It began life as a two-page treatment for a commission from the BBC Writersroom 10 scheme via West Yorkshire Playhouse. However, King didn’t return to the play until much later. “And then I was massively overdue on it, and I was like, I can’t do it. I just can’t do it.” It took a brisk pep talk from Alex Chisholm, West Yorkshire Playhouse’s literary manager, to break the block. “She said, look, you’ve written Foxfinder. You’re a good playwright. If you write a bad play it doesn’t make you a bad writer. I give you my full permission for this to be shit.”
So, King went on “a sort of retreat” and wrote 40 pages in just a week. (“I kind of know that if I can get past page 20, I’ll probably be able to write a whole script,” she tells me earlier.) Then Max Stafford-Clark invited her to a meeting (“in that chair,” she points). “I told him I’d written this first draft and he said, ‘Well, I’d like to read it.’ And I was like, really? A first draft? He said, ‘I’m used to reading drafts’ and I realised that, obviously, I should let him read it. And he wanted to do it, which was amazing.”
Ciphers is a deliberate departure for King, who didn’t want to write “another play that had symbolic animals and was moody and rainy. That would be really odd.” Thus, the chilling allegorical simplicity of a rural dystopia shadowed by paranoia and repression has been replaced by a larger-scale and more theatrically ambitious look at a city in the here-and-now, riven with lies and deceit.
It’s clear that King finds this discarding of what has gone before for something new and unknown a nerve-wracking experience at times, but creatively crucial. In this, she is inspired by the rich and prolific output of one of her heroes, British writer Caryl Churchill. “There are so many plays and they’re all so different. She makes the world of each one as complete as possible. That’s what I aspire to do.”
She continues: “I think it’s good that I did Foxfinder and then this. I guess, for me, I follow an idea as far as it goes. And if that takes me into territory that might make people go, ‘Why have you written this for the stage?’ I’m still going to do it.”
And if that means drawing on different sources of drama, she’s all for it. The trailer for Ciphers has a fast-paced, Spooks-like feel to it; the TV political thriller transposed on to the stage. King’s a huge supporter of such overlaps, arguing that it “will happen more and more in theatre” as writers like her “work in more and more mediums” and incorporate their influences. She points to the success of Lucy Kirkwood’s Chimerica as an example:
“It’s massive, with all of those different locations and characters. There would have been a time when people would have said, ‘No, that’s a film.’ Whereas now”¦ I don’t think that there are any subjects than can’t be theatre. And I just want to make theatre that I want to see and that I think is really exciting.”
As well as Ciphers, King is awaiting the release of The Karman Line, a short film she wrote based on a friend’s story about a woman who slowly loses touch with the ground and floats into the air. “I mean they were doing the credits, so it must be nearly done,” she says, smiling. The post-production process has been an eye-opening experience.
Foxfinder at the Finborough, 2011. Photo: Garry Lake
King is also enjoying the ongoing international progress of Foxfinder. Currently, it is playing in Greece, in Greek, and has just been translated into German for a radio adaptation set in Germany. After Exeter, King will leave the Ciphers tour to see a new production in Portland, Oregon, followed by one in ReykjavÃk, Iceland.
Modestly, she ascribes Foxfinder’s popularity abroad to the practical benefits of its small number of characters. But its taut writing, stark storytelling and allegorical flexibility are key. The farm, the woods, the government agent and the scapegoated fox provide a prismatic reflection of a host of different social issues in differing cultural settings. “In Australia they said you could see that the play had strong echoes with the current situation with migrant boat people. And I was like, ‘yeah!'” King says.
Also on the theatre front, King has an attachment at the National Theatre Studio coming up, which will give her space and time to develop new ideas. “I’ve split it up so I’ve got one month before Christmas and one more after Ciphers opens at the Bush. I think I’ll be too distracted otherwise.”
Hearing the cast speaking her lines for the first time was a “total buzz” for King. “I was like, yeah, OK, I think this might be quite good, actually.” But she admits that, come Ciphers‘ opening night, she’s likely to be extremely nervous. “I might have to stay out of the auditorium. I don’t want to have a panic attack or faint.” She smiles. “But I’m sure it’ll be fine. I’ll just sit at the back and hide.”
Ciphers will be at Exeter Northcott Theatre from 16 – 19 October, followed by the Everyman Theatre, Cheltenham (22 -26 October); Tobacco Factory Theatre, Bristol (29 October – 2 November); Oxford Playhouse (6 – 9 November); Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh (12 – 16 November); Warwick Arts Centre (19 – 23 November); Bush Theatre, London (14 January – 8 February); and Salisbury Playhouse (11 – 15 February).
